Did Government Really Invent the Internet?

It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way….

If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.

But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.

Actually, the Internet as it stands today – a medium for exchanging information among people – was developed at CERN by the scientists there to allow for rapid dissemination of discoveries.

http://www.kennethballard.com Kenneth

Yeah he’s got it fairly correct. Xerox invented many of the things we take for granted today: graphical user interfaces, the mouse, Ethernet. But much of the early growth of the Internet came through private collaboration, notably in academic circles. Technical documents called RFCs (Request for Comment) led to new protocols and standards regarding the Internet. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization behind numerous standards on the Internet, including HTML and XML, originally drafted by independent private organizations collaborating together.

The first successful graphical web browser (“Mosaic”) and HTTP service were developed by NCSA — National Center for Supercomputing Applications — part of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. NCSA was also a significant contributor to the one standard that arguably powers the web even more than HTTP and HTML: the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), enabling the creation of search engines, web forms, and the like.

The government didn’t create the Internet, neither did Al Gore. The Internet is the poster-child of collaborative development, needs being filled. The only involvement that the government had is that a lot of that development took place at government-subsidized universities and organizations.

Ralbert

“The only involvement that the government had is that a lot of that development took place at government-subsidized universities and organizations.”

AKA, the only involvement the government had in inventing the internet, was funding it. Hmmm…

Mark Seal

It is correct, with some missing information. See ALOHAnet, the system that ethernet was based on. As far as a linking the world together with(near) instant information exchange, this was one of the goals of Tesla when he started building the Wardenclyffe Tower; in 1901. The technology worked, he simply ran out of money(and made an enemy of J.P. Morgan). This would have linked both telephones and Fax machines across the Atlantic wirelessly.

E.H. Munro

He also forgot the role played by BBN in inventing the internet.

Deet

I thought Al Gore invented the internet? Lol

http://www.facebook.com/mark.l.heilman Mark L Heilman

Everyone over 70 swears the internet is AOL!!!

http://www.facebook.com/james.lick James Lick

Much of the early Internet was developed by universities and research institutes. Some of these were private, but nearly all the funding was from the federal government. In fact, until the early 90s you couldn’t even get an Internet link unless you signed a contract saying you would not use it for any commercial activity. (I.e. commercial companies connecting to the Internet could only use it in support of their non-commercial customers.)

The part about ethernet is largely irrelevant to the Internet as ethernet is a local area network. The traditional copper wire connections are limited to 100 meters and even the fiber optic versions are only spec’d for a few miles per segment. Ethernet is only really useful within a building or a office park. The interesting thing about the Internet is that it is a wide area network which now spans the globe. That was all run over telecom links using different technologies than ethernet.
One important point is very true though. The Internet didn’t take off until the mid 90s. The usual story is that it was the advent of the web browser that caused things to take off, but I think it was more that the last shackles of non-commercial restrictions were thrown off during the early 90s, and this let in innovators who were previously shut out.
So I would give points to both arguments. Yes, the early Internet was largely publicly funded, but it took commercialization in the free market to really put its potential to good use. (I’ve been on the Internet since 1986.)

Martial_Artist

Much of the funding came from DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which established the ARPANet as a mechanism for the Agency (part of DoD) and its funded researchers, many of whom were working on grants at universities, efficiently to exchange data sets and related communications with appropriate colleagues working at other universities or within government laboratories, and to do so within a secure digital network. So the role of someone such as Algore (no relation to lab assistant Igor, despite the obvious similarities) was in voting for the funding and likely encouraging his colleagues in the Senate to support it.
(As an aside, there is no truth to the rumor that the term algorithm for a computer subroutine’s logic is a tribute to Algore. Despite my suggesting it, it just never caught on).Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer

http://twitter.com/shanedk Shane Killian

There is one thing the government deserves credit for. With TCP/IP, they left session-layer functions (such as authentication) to the application (an incredibly bad idea NOT repeated in the OSI model). What this means is, anyone can send an email to anyone else in the world with no way of verifying the authenticity of the sender. And that is where all our wonderful spam comes from!

Tom Utley

It’s like anything else in our mixed economy: it is impossible to say that it was invented entirely without any “aid” from the government considering the government confiscates 20-30% of the capital in this country and then redistributes it in the form of roads, research grants, military contracts, etc.

The article is mostly right, though it does give a little too much credit to Ethernet when most of the long haul technologies use other physical links.

The internet as we know it is a private enterprise that was invented by profit-seekers. Digital electronic communications pre-date the internet and took many forms, including ARPAnet, but nothing existed like the internet until TCP/IP came along. This standard basically took networks from being closed, centrally planned loops, to being open, “anarchist” webs with endpoints all over the place. To connect to this network, all you need is a unique IP address, and you instantly have access to any other device with a public IP address. Of course, the level of access depends on the device, and some don’t grant any access. But I digress.

The internet itself is actually a good parallel to the free economy. Each device (identified with an IP address) is an actor, and the devices exchange with each other in a gazillion transactions per second. Routers are used to connect devices to networks and networks to other networks, so they sort of act like independent brokers. Web servers could be seen as the big mega-corps that have lots of web content that they serve out to various devices. All of it happens without central planning. Even things that you would think need to controlled by one central agency – like domain names – are actually handled my multiple companies that work together to resolve disputes and such.

ARPAnet is actually a good example of the failures of central planning. I forget exactly how it worked, but it didn’t expand well, a small change could cause a failure of the entire system, it was slow, and the average person didn’t have access to it. Just like food in Soviet Russia.

In the U.S., at University in the very early 1980’s I used their link to the DOD’s internet, ARPANET, a DARPA project. My memory is not good on this, but I think I used VAX code; fun was not included. We had decades since been able to link computers by physical cable. The first phone transmissions were done by the Apollo Engineering Contract, in the 60’s, from Downey, CA to Cape Canavaral, later Kennedy) over Ma Bell lines, and success took about 1.25 years. This work was done on an IBM 7094, the first transistorized mainframe, to the Stretch computer at Canavaral.

Internet as we think of it couldn’t really occur until personal destop computers became available, wtih monitors. People began building their own in the early 80’s, with Radio Shack parts.

But real internet, as used today, needed the outside help. CERN contributed TCP/IP and, by physicist Tim Berners-Lee,,HTML. Hyper-text Mark Up Language opened internet to the world, anyone could learn it with no special training. Tim Berners-Lee also invented the web browser (the world-wide-web) to display HTML. And the world was born anew.

Today the ‘Masters of the Internet are the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force. They set the standards, protocols, for transmsiion of packets and packet switching, and for Domain Name Servers (DNS) which also came from APARNET.

So yes, one might say the Gov’t did it, but Al Gore was not involved. But remember, the Gov’ts only part was to funnel tax payers money to private research and private contractors. The Apollo project contributed quite a lot of the early computer engineering work which otherwise might not have been done at that time, but all the rest was done by other private non-defense contractors whch would likely have been done anyway. IBM already existed, then came Bill Gates and Apple developing personal computers.

During my career I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in many parts of computer and internet developement, from hard-core computers forward. It was quite a ride, heaven for a geeky-nerd.

Bob_Robert

While the original development of ARPAnet was funded by DARPA, it’s important to remember that TCP/IP and the many other interoperability developments were not done by one person or one agency. They developed cooperatively amongst many different companies, universities and govt agents such as Laurance LIvermore Labs.

The importance of the RFC process cannot be over-stated. Feedback from anyone meant that ideas could be tried out and what worked documented for others to share. It was collaboration that built the ‘Net, not “government”.

But it’s also important to understand just what it is people mean when they say “The Internet”. What we see today ONLY came about when the government got out of the way.

In 1992, AlGore was pushing the Information Superhighway. He argued that for exactly the same reason that “only govt” could build superhighways capable of fulfilling people’s needs, then “only govt” could build networking systems big enough, and fast enough, to be useful. And he wasn’t entirely wrong, in that maintaining what we would now laugh at in terms of speed and capacity at the peering points was, at the time, prohibitively expensive.

But then A Miracle Happened: The National Science Foundation got out of the way. They dropped the requirement of “non-commercial traffic only”, they dropped the requirement that all “peering” (deciding just whose network to which to send the data packet) go through NSF arbitration, and they dropped the requirement that everyone had to peer only at NSF facilities.

The explosion of traffic was not instantaneous, it couldn’t be. The routers at the time simply could not be pushed any faster. Cisco is still riding the high of reputation they gained by figuring out how to make routers big enough to handle the traffic loads that began increasing, then exploding, over those first few years.

What languished in obscurity for 20 years exploded in less than 2 from a myth to an every-day reality for millions of people.

So who actually built The Internet? Commerce did.

Bob_Robert

I’d also like to point out something which I read, and wish I could remember enough to link to the original.

The basic TCP/IP protocol was not what govt wanted. Govt spent years tax dollars trying to develop the OSI networking system. TCP/IP was created by collaboration between universities and corporations, built from the bottom-up. OSI was organized through the UN, built from the top-down, built by committee, you can add your own negative repercussions.

The repercussion that matters is that OSI never worked. TCP/IP did, and does.

His version is a bit simplistic. The actually story of today’s “Internet” is even more fascinating, and both a literal and figurative metaphor for decentralization, deregulation, competition and free-market success.

What people tend to refer to as “the Internet” is really the “world-wide-web”. The actual internet in a massive series of independent networks tied together. The connections are via various form of “peering” agreements.

The technologies of the modern-day Internet were not always the primary ones used – they are the ones which won out via competition; largely due to the to their simplicity and ability to scale better (due to a more ‘decentralized’ decision making model).

The main competitor to Ethernet was Token-Ring, which had the backing then Super-Giant IBM. Token-ring was very elegant in many ways. It was deterministic and practiced “fairness” – providing each computer on the network a “fair” opportunity to access network resources. Because of this level of “fairness control”, one could also make sure that certain computers, which one felt were more important, consistantly got a higher proportion of that “fair share” of access to the network. However, this fairness, also meant that resources weren’t always used the best. Because computers with nothing to say, still had to be presented the opportunity to use their fair-share of “time on the wire”.

Ethernet on the other hand, is more like the talk at the local pub. With computers waiting for the breaks in the conversations of others, in order to jump in and spit something out. Sometimes more than one will try to talk at the same time, at which time they all pause and see who will start chatting again first. Although, not strictly as fair as the deterministic token-ring – it was simpler, cheaper, easier to deploy, got the job done very well and tended to make better use to the vast majority of environments.

Ultimately, Ethernet won.

*note: Ethernet was based on work done with ALOHAnet, but the real “Aha” moment was done by Dr. Robert Metcafe in his Phd thesis, before he joined Xerox and helped co-create ethernet. Dr. Metcafe later went on to state 3Com.

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Like it’s Ethernet cousin, TCP/IP was not the only game in town. There was a plethora of (at the time) viable competitors: NetBEUI, IPX/SPX, ATM, DECnet, AppleTalk, ISO/OSI, SNA, etc.

Some were simpler, some were more deterministic, some were more robust. All continued to evolve, but IP won out – it was more scalable then some of the simpler protocols and simpler than some of the more robust protocols.

And the way that IP is able to magically get information from one place in the world to another – even though neither end point knowns the way – is due a series of decentralized choices made along the way by routers; the invisible hands of the Internet. Trying to centralize even a fraction of these decisions would bring the decision maker to its knees.

One device must hand information to another device, who hands it to another and so on. Each device having to trust (but sometimes verify) that the next device will both do its job, and make the right decision. Again, other protocols that attempted to do this through “centralized” planning failed to scale in size to match the growing environments.

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You could also get into the massive gains made after the deregulation done in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 – which opened the market to competition which, after some turmoil, led to cost reduction and more consumer choice.

You could get into the miracle of WiFi, which has succeeded by sharing essentially “unregulated” frequency space with other technologies. Innovators and competitors working together to self-manage usage and minimize interference with one another.

Like other areas of the tech industry, WiFi vendor compatibility and standards (which are consent determined by the industry through a mix of market competition, competitor consensus, and consumer involvement), is validated and determined by market created group: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Alliance

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it goes on and on…. I’ve only scratched the surface.

Jason

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/xerox-internet/ – the Murdoch owned WSJ is at it again. Just because you invented the wheel doesn’t mean you invented the car. I’m all for limited government and all but this is a distortion of the facts. Glad you didn’t blindly endorse the position 🙂 btw I LOVE THIS WEBSITE 🙂

Here’s an analogy: is it like saying the FCC invented radio? Also, even though it the claim that Al Gore invented it seems funny, it is downright sobering to consider the implications of BigGov grabbing more control of any infrastructure. See attached pic of the Media Usage Pyramid, m which is a more sociological view, but interesting.

http://www.facebook.com/Amaroq64 Steven Swenson

I’d like to add an important point to this discussion. Government cannot fund anything of its own accord. It cannot make money on its own. It takes money from people via taxes. So even though there seems to be a controversy here in the comments about the government’s role, we should acknowledge that ultimately, the private sector made it possible. To the extent the government pushed, prodded, or funded it, it coerced us into making it. The free market still gets the credit.

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